


Janus

by rainer76



Category: Fringe
Genre: Gen, One Night in October, Spoilers for 4:02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-11
Updated: 2011-10-11
Packaged: 2017-10-24 12:51:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/263656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainer76/pseuds/rainer76
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One night in October - the closing of the military season - and a quiet conversation between two old friends and a perceived enemy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Janus

**Author's Note:**

> The interpretation of Janus as the god of beginnings and transitions is grounded on a third etymology by Cicero, Ovid, and Macrobius, which explains the name as Latin deriving from the verb ire (to go). It has been conjectured to be derived from the Indo-European root meaning: transitional movement  
> – extract from Wikipedia.
> 
> Rites of Janus: traditionally occurred in the beginning of the New Year, and in October, the closing of the military season.  
> – extract from Wikipedia.
> 
> Special thanks to Kerithwyn for pulling beta-duties on this story. Any and all remaining errors are entirely my fault.

There are things she misses from the other side, like the over abundance of fruits and vegetables - falling off the crates, available between seasons and out of seasons, avocado beside apples, beetroot beside beans. She spent her first night reading profile cases with a bowl of cherries beside her, fingers stained red, flicking a stem between her tongue and the back of her teeth.

Olivia doesn’t drink. She never found the taste for it, cursed with a body composition that overbalanced with anything heavier than the occasional glass of wine. Her counterpart does. Miss-I-keep-my-jacket-buttoned could keep a nightclub in trade but her cupboards were curiously bare. Olivia had the impression other people fed her, the way Astrid would bring in baked goods or how Walter would absent-mindedly make two sandwiches, cutting the crusts off and slicing the bread into four triangles, as if feeding a recalcitrant toddler. Her double drank though, mixing between malted scotch and twenty-year-old whisky.

As McClennan slumped sideways, a fine mist of brain matter splattering against the wall, his knees knocking, she thinks this is the perfect opportunity to start drinking. She has no empathy for him – Olivia’s been looking at the faces of his victims too long to feel anything other than sharp satisfaction, primal and right. Her double turned away in the last second, flinching to the right, and Olivia’s heart is still racing, adrenaline surge mixed with shocked anger because taking your eyes off the target’s a rookie mistake and if her double did it with McClennan – _that _version of McClennan - then she’s not compartmentalising as well as she should. It was three long paces before Olivia was in position to back her double up and… It’s not a mistake Olivia would make. She’s certain.__

Now there’s nothing but the mess to clean up.

Olivia’s double crouches beside the professor. Her collar’s perfect and there’s not a single strand of blonde hair out of place. The EMTs confer on the marriage of technology, debating the best method to disengage the tubes from the man’s punctured brain. Lincoln hovers, arms folded over his chest, his hip planted against the workbench. He’s staring.

She knows the intensity of the look. It’s jarring, seeing the weight, the consideration, directed elsewhere. Olivia falters, she feels something turn over in her stomach, tight and unhappy, her face poker-set as she takes the steps down to their level. “Your man Broyles has the exchange set up, we can move the professor at your earliest convenience. Again, we extend our medical services…?”

“No,” Dunham interrupts. There’s no expression on her face, eyes flickering over Olivia. She misses the open disdain, those easy markers that made her counterpart readable. “You’ve done enough already. Professor McClennan belongs with his own people, he should be somewhere familiar when he wakes up.”

She’s like a splinter beneath Olivia’s skin, uncomfortable and annoying. She wants to push at it until something breaks the surface. Insult or statement, Olivia wonders, tracking over her double’s words. Her teeth part in a thin smile.

Lincoln takes one look at her and interrupts before Olivia can respond, pushing away from the desk. “That’s fine. Our agents will escort Professor McClennan to the bridge, but we need to head back to Division…” Dunham frowns, her pleated slacks falling in a straight column as she stands. She looks set to argue. “Mission debrief,” Lincoln says loudly, with the same tone he uses when beating Olivia into verbal submission. “Our world. Our rules.”

Division remains in Boston while the bridge resides in New York. There’s a flicker of impatience on Dunham’s face, the acknowledgment it will be hours yet before she can catch up with her own Broyles or learn McClennan’s condition. The professor’s buried under heat blankets, his complexion the same color as the bandage covering his forehead. He looks diminished to Olivia’s eye, gutted. Dunham’s face tightens.

“He’ll be in good hands,” Lincoln says softly. “I promise.”

It must be part of her imagination, a glimpse out of the corner of her eye, but Olivia swears her double relaxes, as if _I promise _were an overture to be trusted. They return to Boston in two cars. Olivia drives with Lincoln beside her, the radio set to the quiet drone of D12. He has one foot pressed against the dash, contorted in a half curl, toes tapping to imagery music. Dunham follows in the second vehicle, riding with Agent Koepen. When Olivia checks the rear-view mirror she can see her double in the passenger seat, gaze fixed out the window.__

“How did she escape?” she asks offhandedly.

Two weeks spent over there and Olivia barely had time to complete her mission before the disks in her hands started to glow. Timely, because Astrid was looking at her askance: Olivia was at the point where she was contemplating bedding the younger agent if it helped to divert her attention. The foot on the dash stops tapping. Olivia keeps her eyes on the road.

“Looking for pointers?” he asks teasingly.

Olivia looks at him quickly, her smile bright. “I’ve read her file, remember? The only pointer she can give is how to compromise a unit by sleeping with her co-workers.” She flicks the indicator on, takes the corner faster than intended. “That, and did you hear the dig in the basement? Blaming me?”

“It wasn’t you she was pissed at,” Lincoln hooks a hand through the door-strap, “and also, slow down.”

Olivia looks at him disbelievingly and presses a little harder on the pedal. She feels the engine growl, the surge of power as the car streamlines into gear. Hours of reading, flicking through files and there had been nothing, absolutely nothing, about Dunham’s stepfather; she doesn’t like being caught off guard.

Dunham’s house had been bright but lacking photographs, her books were neatly alphabetized and dry - tomes on psychology, science, or physics. Olivia thought Dunham’s interest might have been a recent turn, an attempt to keep up with Walter’s antics but the books were old, the pages thumbed through and well read, as if Dunham’s interest dated back decades.

Olivia highlighted passages from her own e-books. The early manuals from Fringe Division were dotted with fluorescent yellow, putting emphasis on topics she needed to brush up on. Dunham didn’t need the visual crutch. She didn’t seem to need much of anything. She wonders if Professor McClennan took a stroll through Dunham’s empty rooms, her overly bright walls, what impression would he be left with? That is, if McClennan could string two thoughts together.

She grimaces and cricks her neck to one side before she eases back on the pedal. John McClennan was Dunham’s citizen, her responsibility, and Olivia’s never been good at self-recrimination, in either world. Lincoln’s still watching her; the car slows. He snorts and turns his gaze away. His foot resumes tapping.

“You must know something,” Olivia continues. “Come on, the security’s never been breached before. How’d she get out?”

“Liv, I swear, I do not know the circumstances of her escape.” He closes his eyes, pushing his skull against the headrest. “You know me, I couldn’t keep a secret from you if I tried.” Olivia has the engagement ring to prove it. Lincoln twists around, back wedged against the door, upper torso turned toward her. “Why? Do you reckon you could do the same? Escape the impenetrable prison?”

“Of course I could,” she answers blithely. “She’s _me _.”__

Something flickers in his eyes, mercurial and…angry…before it vanishes. “Yes,” he says, succinctly. “She is.”

Olivia wonders what it was like for her double, to be locked away in complete darkness, sensory deprivation stretched over two long weeks. Her stomach tightens again, the same sense of unease trickling down her spine. Lincoln’s profile is familiar to her as Frank’s. The topography of his nose, the thin line of his mouth pursed as he looks out the window. Lincoln had trusted Dunham with his back in McClennan’s field and it occurs to her – the thought worming through her bones like a slow fever - that her double’s not the only one having difficulty compartmentalising. “The media will be happy,” she says, changing the subject.

“Serial killer caught,” he agrees. “First round’s on me.”

“You’re only offering because Charlie’s not here to drink his body-weight in alcohol.”

If the banter’s stilted, it’s because Olivia’s trying to recall the bedrock of her own certainty, the moments when she believed Lincoln couldn’t lie to her face.

 

***

Lincoln does most of the talking at Headquarters. Dunham occasionally interrupts with a minor correction but otherwise remains quiet. Olivia hooks her feet around the chair legs and tries not to fidget, her eyes tracking over the micro-expressions on her double’s face. Olivia had worked with shape-shifters before her stint over there – it was easy to look at them and think _not human _, something cold and mercurial in their eyes, their bodies slithering into alien shapes. It was easy to send Newton to his death, to stare at something so lifelike, real, and think _expendable _.____

It was easy to look at her alternate and think wrong.

Maybe it was a cop-out, maybe it was the quickest way to achieve her objective, but seeing the two worlds in a black and white column of us-versus-them was the only way Olivia could manage it. She doesn’t think that line of reasoning ever worked on Lincoln. She’s you, he said, as if the idea of Olivia being locked away in darkness _anywhere _was unacceptable.__

She scratches her engagement ring against the tabletop. Broyles darts his eyes toward her, mouth thinning. Olivia flattens her palm, her thoughts circling to the stepfather. There had been no mention of him in the dossier Olivia was given, which meant the police records were sealed, and that was Olivia’s only clue as to when the event occurred. From across the table, Dunham turns to face her.

They break just after nine pm. Broyles shrugs his jacket on, one ear on his comm., already on the line to his wife as he hurries out the door. The three remaining agents slump, losing some of their stiffness now that their commanding officer’s left. Lincoln heads toward the communal kitchen and returns with three glasses, a bottle of Jamieson’s clutched in his hand. “If ever a day called for it?”

Dunham nods slowly.

Lincoln pours two glasses, one eyebrow quirked in Olivia’s direction. She shrugs, moving closer, and plants herself on the table with her feet resting in the well of her chair. Dunham rolls her seat away a fraction, creating space, the highball clasped loosely between her fingertips, elbows braced on her knees. Lincoln flips his seat around and straddles it, arms lying on top of the backrest until the three of them resemble a rough semi-circle. Dunham’s hair has fallen loose from its habitual ponytail, dishevelled strands framing her face. She pulls the tie free as Olivia watches and scratches the back of her skull until the tresses fall wild across her shoulder blades, no longer straight. It gives her a slightly feral look, Olivia decides, and then wonders if her shoulders are really that small. Dunham knocks the first glass of whisky back as if it’s nothing but water. Lincoln refills her glass at a slower pace. “I’m sorry about McClennan,” Olivia offers.

Dunham raises her chin, her eyes sharp, there’s a beat where she seems to be taking Olivia’s measure before she answers. “Not your fault.”

“Him pulling a runner wasn’t your fault either.” There’s a pensive stillness for a minute, Olivia turns the glass around in her hand and takes a small sip. No one’s inclined to talk about work.

“So, tell me about my double,” Lincoln says wryly, taking up the neutral space between them like Switzerland.

Dunham looks at him, her mouth twitching. “You want to _know _about your twin?”__

“He looks adorable,” Lincoln says, with the air of a man who’s been teased mercilessly and has come up with a one-sentence defense.

“Adorable,” Olivia parodies, all wide-eyed innocence, “if you have a boyhood crush on Clark Kent, that is.”

“Not seeing the insult there,” Lincoln retorts, grinning, and then mouths at Dunham. “Man of steel? Yes?”

Dunham shakes her head, her smile reluctant. “Mountain of frustration, last I saw. Walter started the morning calling him Kennedy, progressed to Washington by lunch and ended on Clinton.”

“I absolutely did not have sex with that woman!” Olivia intones. The laugh this time is real, punched out of Dunham’s chest as if taken by surprise. Olivia grins at her loosely.

“Not for lack of trying,” Lincoln mutters sotto voce.

Olivia, who is used to the insults thrown Frank’s way, to the casual way Lincoln usurps her space, tilts her head at him. “I tried it on with Astrid when I was over there,” she confides, just messing with his head. “Come to think of it, it might have been what gave the game away.”

“You did not.”

“I seem to recall a lot of running.”

Lincoln wavers, uncertain, then spots the look on Dunham’s face, his mouth curving as he reads the truth. “This conversation is weirdly reminding me of my sister’s slumber-parties.”

“Hard core liquor and fictional sex?”

“Confessional secrets and outright lies.” He takes a healthy swig. The bottle gets passed between Olivia, Lincoln, and Dunham.

Olivia nurses her drink and prays it’s her sense of balance that’s thrown off-kilter and not a fringe event shaking the premises. This is why she doesn’t drink, Olivia thinks mournfully, watching as Lincoln sprawls in his seat and Dunham remains clear-eyed. The conversation flows easily, directed by Lincoln and staying on the right side of frivolous. They play games of “Who starred in that movie?” Tom Selleck or Harrison Ford, and which made the better _Indiana Jones _(absolutely not, Dunham insists, aghast at the prospect of Selleck in a fedora) and eventually progress to small tidbits about their personal lives. It feels like a stolen moment, like the stories of soldiers in World War One, crawling out of their trenches on Christmas day, pressing sepia photographs of their loved ones into each other’s hands.__

I’ll hate you again tomorrow, Olivia thinks tiredly.

“My mother never remarried after dad died,” she confesses at one stage, listing to port. She seeks out Dunham and smiles tumultuously, agitated without understanding why. “She was too worried about raising us right, I guess. Too preoccupied with Rachel and me.” Marilyn buried all of her grief into raising her children and then nearly shattered apart when Rachel died. The memory is still raw in Olivia’s mind, the wound cauterized by alcohol, by the eight years since her sister’s death. Did you hate our mother, Olivia thinks fuzzily, for refusing to protect you?

“Mom hated to be alone,” Dunham responds and there’s understanding in her voice, hard won acceptance. There’s the sound of a chair scraping back, of a jacket being pulled on. “Don’t settle for safe.” Dunham warns, her breath ghosting over Olivia’s cheek. Her engagement ring taps against the tabletop as Dunham presses her hand over it once.

Olivia jerks away, running her knuckles over the grains of redwood. The desk is old, worth a small fortune on the black market of Olivia’s world, pot-marked with untold history. It sat in the FBI building for half a century before the department was disbanded and was gifted to Fringe by President Gore in the early nineties. President Gore here, Clinton there. Olivia thought she knew about the divergent histories on their respective olive branch. She wonders about being raised by a mother who preferred violence over her own fear of solitude, about the concept of ‘safe’. How Lincoln reels her in by the arm when she’s ready to run off the edge versus Frank’s slow smile.

Her eyes startle open when Dunham presses her palm to Olivia’s cheek. She has lion eyes, the same colour as whisky, or that breathless moment before dawn breaks into day. The kiss seems out of character – it ought to be me, is what Olivia thinks – it’s totally something l’d do. Dunham’s tongue slides into her mouth, slow as an oncoming siege. It’s not chaste, and it’s not dominating. It’s learning how to breathe again, cobbled together.

Her eyes are still open when Dunham withdraws. She can feel Lincoln on the periphery of her awareness, hear the soft hitch of his breathing as Dunham collects her things. “How did you escape the prison?” Olivia demands, doggedly.

“Looking for pointers?”

Lincoln chokes on a laugh, turning it into an unconvincing cough as Olivia remembers her earlier suspicions; no one escaped the prison before. “You had help somewhere,” Olivia hazards, and doesn’t look at Lincoln.

“They locked me in a darkroom with the shutter drawn for two weeks.” When Olivia stares at her, uncomprehending, Dunham says flatly, “It’s another form of sensory deprivation, and no, I’ve never needed help. Not from anyone.”

That _is _a dig, Olivia decides.__

She slides off the table and locks her knees to stop herself from pooling onto the floor. Dunham doesn’t even know Frank, her previous words like a surgical strike, not feeling the cut until well after the fact, peeling the layers of Olivia’s own fears. Frank’s not safe, and the presumption that he is, that Olivia would _choose _safe is nothing but ridiculous. Dunham doesn’t know her; she doesn’t even have the benefit of walking in her shoes for two weeks. If Olivia’s going to end this night bloodied and drunk, she wants to get her own kicks in.__

She wraps one hand around her double’s wrist and draws her in, the two of them standing upright, two-faced as Janus, forever faced in opposite directions except for the hindbrain where they merge into one. The kiss is warm as alcohol, a burn that scorches through her muddied thoughts, one hand tangled in blonde hair, the left sitting on Dunham’s ass, fingers curling inward with the material, dipping into the crack.

She opens her mouth wide, chasing the taste of herself, that simmering rage Dunham can’t hide, which flavours all of their interactions together. It’s heat, a thigh grinding between Dunham’s legs. Olivia releases her hair, curving one hand until it’s set on the other woman’s jaw, her thumb angled into the jugular. “Maybe Frank is playing it safe.”

Because maybe there are other men who love Olivia more; but Dunham holds her aloofness like a shield, like a child raised by a mother who was terrified to be alone and grew up to be the exact opposite. “But not being in a relationship at all, that’s you playing it safe, too.” Olivia steps back and lets the circle of lies go until only the rut of truth is left behind. “You and I…we’re as brave as each other.”

Dunham’s mouth is swollen from the kiss. Her eyes flash once, her spine straight, unyielding, before she walks out of the room. Olivia slumps as soon as the other woman’s gone. “I’m not escorting her to the bridge. This was your bright idea, Lee, bringing McClennan here, you do it.”

He looks sweaty and uncomfortable, as if his clothes are too tight for his skin; Lincoln dropped his jacket over his lap at some stage, covering his groin, a stain of redness high on his cheekbones. He rocks once, pressing against the chair and says roughly, “Y-yeah…give me a minute.”

She walks carefully to the nearest wall and props herself against it, her neck arched toward the ceiling. She’s cold, this side of dizzy, her stomach reeling with alcohol and not enough food, all of her resentment once amplified but now gone. She has the uncomfortable feeling they were shouting at each other while never talking about the same thing. She turns the ring around on her finger.

Olivia sucks on her bottom lip, pulling the electric flavour of booze and otherness into her mouth. There are a thousand worlds out there: worlds where she marries Frank and it’s nice, _easy _, nothing she needs to work at. Worlds where Olivia walks away, or vice-versa, and the ache doesn’t tear her apart. It doesn’t leave Olivia searching for Frank’s face in the work-hours of her time, where leaving him is also easy. There must be worlds where she takes a page from her double’s book, breaks her own set of concrete rules - where Olivia sleeps with a co-worker – risking something best left untouched. Worlds, maybe, where Olivia and her double get along. Lincoln pushes away from his seat. He moves cautiously, hunched over. “I’m sorry,” Olivia says, grimacing.__

He pulls up short. Lincoln doesn’t look angry; he shakes his head once and says dryly. “I’ll request Clark Kent next time, we’re bound to be more civil than the two of you.”

“I have no objections to that.” Olivia drops her eyes to his jacket, strategically looped over his forearm, covering his crotch, and realises the truth of it. She’ll take Clark Kent over her double any day.

There’s a medical-kit somewhere, stacked with an epi-pen that can provide Olivia with sobriety in thirty seconds flat. She’s never liked the free association alcohol provides, the weightless sensation while adrift in her own thoughts. Lincoln was turned on by the sight of them kissing, he was turned on by the thought of her and Astrid together. Lincoln’s been turned on since the moment they met, and unlike Frank, the thought doesn’t leave her calm.

There must be a melting ground somewhere, a common space where Olivia and her double meet. A thousand worlds Olivia thinks wistfully: worlds where Dunham’s overly bright room is filled with photographs and ticket stubs, where her bookshelf is chaotic, crammed full, the fantasy novels of her youth side-by-side with hard science and jazz. Where she’ll reach out for something against reason and hold onto it tight - draw it into herself - until it’s tangible and real, where strength doesn’t equate to solitude. They’re as brave as each other, Olivia thinks, and meets Lincoln’s eyes.


End file.
